I’ve Stopped Supporting Government, Now How Shall I Oppose It?

A friend writes…

You are cutting your support of The
Gov whilst loving Our
Land. And your best way is to live beneath the economic radar above which all
are taxed and threatened if not compliant. Granted, you are in your small and
moral way taking resources [but] if money is #1, what is #2? What is the
next biggest way that you allow, support, yield to The Power. Or, by omission
of action, do you give The Power freedom to be?

Do you have a moral obligation to evangelize? To write for common papers, to
take your soap box to the street, park or Embarcadero? To write letters of
wallet tightening to every address at your disposal? Further, since you are
unemployed, you could take the issues of injustice, paint
’em on your sign and park
outside the White House. Would that do more good than blogging?

Heh heh. Sounds like you’ve called my self-righteousness and raised me. The
money bit is pretty obvious and up-front. It is positive, direct, measurable
support. But that does beg the question: to overuse an overworked political
metaphor, could I congratulate a German who lived through the Reich managing
to avoid taxes the whole while but not in any more active way interfering with
its activities?

I’ve stopped my active support of the government, but I could certainly be
doing more to actively oppose it. As for education and propaganda, these
Picket Line pages have a patheticly small readership
given the amount of energy I put into them, but what I hope to accomplish is
to leave a trail that folks can follow should they so choose.

I think I can see where you’re going with your line of argument, but you’re
just sort of hinting at it. It sounds like what you’re saying is something
like this: “If you’re going to live your live according to some sort of
altruistic-like ethics, how can you go half-way? How is any ineffeciency or
luxury justifiable when the alternative would be to help to further your
cause? And if your answer is that you’ve got your priorities and sometimes
your personal luxuries take precedence, then would you please shut your pie
hole and stop with your sermons about responsibility and ethics, because the
rest of us have got our priorities too and we’re doing the best we can?”

I’d like to see you wrap your criticism up a little tighter and throw it at me
again, ’cuz this sounds like
an interesting nut to crack.

In a way, I’m questioning myself, using your actions as a measure. There is a
risk of committing, in the Hollywood All-The-Way sense. If I was to let
nothing stop me, how far would I go? What limits would I reach?

I think that I’m hoping to appeal less to a desire for moral purity, and more
to just a reexamination of how you (or anyone else) is actually living in
relation to the more nuanced and smudgy principles you (or anyone else)
already operate under.

I’m not going for purity, myself. At least not in this project.

What I did instead was just to bring my life into sharper focus and realize
that I wasn’t living it the way I wanted to. Specifically, I was giving a
great deal of actual material support to an organization whose actions were
abhorrent to me. Last year, I gave a few hundred
dollars to Amnesty International, a few to the
EFF,
a few to the Drug Policy Foundation. And I felt pretty happy about that. But
it took me a long time to even acknowledge that I gave fifteen
thousand dollars to the
IRSlast year.

I didn’t have to take a vow or pursue sainthood or anything like that, I just
had to honestly come to grips about what I was doing with my life. Then I saw
that it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing with it, and I started doing
something else.

Taxes are so cleverly hidden away — swiped from your paycheck before you even
have time to miss ’em — so
gradual and so ubiquitous, that it’s easy to pretend they’re not really
aspects of your life so much as they are natural phenomena or something. But
there’s a weird double-consciousness about them. Ask someone what their salary
is, what they “make,” etc.
They’ll almost always tell you their before-taxes salary.

They’re able to believe almost simultaneously that it’s their money, they can
take credit for earning it, it belongs to them and it was never their
money in the first place, they have no blame for where it goes or how its
spent, and they don’t miss it.

I hope to help provoke people to reintegrate this double-consciousness, to
feel wholly the actual facts of their situation. Then I hope to fight the
temptation to hide from this by making explicit the various justifications
people use to pretend the truth away. Then I hope to demonstrate

that to the extent that you are paying taxes you are actively and
positively and willfully supporting the government,

that if you feel that the government is doing rotten you should consider
withdrawing that support, and

it’s not all that hard, see?

I ponder the human question of what is balance. How does one reconcile Right
Life with the many comforts and compromises made available for a few dollars
from the many vendors at each street corner and web site, ignoring the cost to
my fellow life forms or future generations?

Here’s what I try to tell myself: “When you’re making a decision about
something (say, whether to get a pitcher of beer down at Zeitgeist) — try to
estimate the actual effects of your decision, as well as you are able, and
without trying to sweep under the rug any of the facts about it. Then decide
whether given the totality of that, what you actually want to do, and
do it. Then, in your spare time, work on reducing as much as possible the
convenient justifications and fact-hiding methods you use, educate yourself
more about the way the world works, and become more honest with yourself about
your actual ethical beliefs as opposed to the ideal ones you
like to think you have but don’t actually practice with consistency because
they don’t in fact match your desires.”

Usually these fact-hiding things come in two flavors:

One: A flaw in your reasoning or perceptual skills — there are a gazillion of
these (optical illusions are a category). Marketers exploit
’em by the handful. Humans are
full of cobbled-together reasoning methods and sensory kludges that are easy
to exploit. You just gotta
keep your skepticism up and keep testing out and examining your ideas. (The
book Inevitable Illusions is a fun catalog of some
of these flaws).

Two: Self-dishonesty about motives and ethics and such. You believe that
you’re motivated by X, yet you do an action Y that seems to contradict that
motivation. Rather than honestly integrating the two, you lie to yourself
about the nature of action Y to make it fit. The best cure for this is
relentless self-criticism, which can be done painfully and involuntarily
through a bad trip or some sort of life crisis, expensively and painstakingly
slowly with psychotherapy, or steadily with practice and enough self-esteem to
put up with how goddamned humbling it is.

Is it worth Right Life to give up friends and move to outer Peoria, to be a
purist? I don’t think so. Is it even vaguely Right Life to reduce my enormous
eco-foot print by 25%?

So I ponder the balance.

In no way do I suggest you should shut your pie hole. I think if all you do
is experiment on the tax front, you serve a good purpose, you probe a
mysterious boundary and like any good scientist you open up the possibility
of discovering A New Way. I’m very curious how much you will compromise. You
already miss your conveniences, you are learning that you’re not all the way
into your new lifestyle and you’re reluctant to drop your
New Yorker subscription, to steal them from
doctor’s offices. I predict when you reach business as usual with your budget
that you will look to the next step at reducing your planetary asshole
quotient.

Chances are you’re right now living roughly the life you want to be living. In
the areas you perceive it to be in conflict with your ideals, you probably
just plain don’t have those ideals, or you do have them but they’re superseded
by other ones you don’t want to acknowledge as such. In some other areas,
you’re probably hiding from facts you’re afraid are there because they either
do conflict with your ideals in frightening ways, or they
don’t conflict with your actual ideals but do conflict with
the ideals you’d like to think you have and you’d rather not notice the
contrast. Or not. But that’s one way I fool myself, anyway.

Question: what if we had a new president (and cabinet and cronies
an’ all that) which apologized
for Bush and his ilk, changed military aid to domestic aid, righted wrongs,
signed Kyoto Protocol and was in your opinion Good. I know your imagination
stretches this far. Would you give up your Frugality and support The
Government again?

Hmmm… what would make me go back to being a government supporter? I don’t
know. I think I’d know it if I saw it. I don’t much support government at all
in the abstract, so it would come down to a cost/benefit sort of thing. If the
government was harmless enough, even though it was stealing money from me and
my friends, I might still throw taxes at it if that’s what it took to make
enough money to do something cool enough to offset the uncool things the tax
money was doing.

On the other hand, the government could force me to support it,
either by literally putting me in irons with a whip at my back or by forcing
me to pay taxes even on the first dollar I earn. I guess in the second case,
there’d still be the option of trying to evade the
gov’t in the underground
economy or some such. But you see what I mean — at some point the
gov’t can make not
supporting it sufficiently painful that supporting it would become the better
option.

So I could be brought back into the system either way, I suppose.
Claire Wolfe said something like
“we’re at an awkward point where it’s too late to work within the system, but
too early to shoot the bastards.” But we’re also at a point where the state is
too evil to actively support, but not so evil that support cannot be withheld.

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